The Strange Design of Conscience
by intastella burst
Summary: Kate pays Jack a visit while on the run. AU, post-island, no flashforwards.


She doesn't know why she waits for him curled up in a ball on his bed. Maybe she thought it would be funny. Maybe she just got tired. Anticipation and strain make the muscles in her face twinge with every breath, and the backs of her legs are itchy against the unmade sheets. She wants to go. This was a bad idea. This is just like every idea she's ever had. What in the world made her think this would be different?

"I had people looking for you." His voice is weak and incredulous and his hands don't chop the air into bullet-pointed soundbites like she remembers. They hang at his sides, as limp and breathless as the rest of him. He is pale--but maybe it's just the lighting.

"I know." She also knows that he gave up on her, stopped checking his mail last week. She smiles, too shyly, and lets him take that as an apology.

She sits up, folding her arms across her chest, and his sunken-in eyes follow every move. She can't breathe around the blocks of elapsed time hanging in the room, dense and heavy like the yanked-shut curtains. She lets her eyes drift because if she keeps looking at him she will feel guilty; there is a half-empty box of tacks on his dresser, discarded newspapers folded neatly in a box on the bookshelf, a map of the country (not the world) on the wall. Iowa is covered by a big red "X." She wants to pat his head and giggle and groan. _Jack_. He wouldn't listen.

He stumbles over a few half-sentences and holds one hand to his forehead, smiling without smiling. He steadies himself on the dresser with the other; there is a tack stuck to his hand, and he flinches but doesn't look. "How?" She can't tell if he's going to laugh or cry or both.

The air conditioner in the corner whines and clatters to a stop. She mourns it already. Now there is only the violence in their breathing to punctuate the silence.

She stands and tries not to sigh or cling too tightly, tries not to show her hand as his arms find their way around to her back and flutter dizzily at her shoulder blades. She doesn't tell him about the smashed-in security camera or how willing his friend Marc had been to provide a key. There are other things she could tell him, things that might make sense, but she doesn't want to lie now. That would be unkind.

She grins against his throat reflexively--maybe it's relief--and she knows he feels it in the way his arms flex and tighten around her. He smells like mouthwash and antiseptic; there is a phone number on his nightstand and she wonders, but doesn't let herself think. Jealousy is for lush green jungles and salty beaches and too-crowded tents; jealousy smells and tastes like gunpowder. She left her gun on the island. Everyone would expect a runaway to carry a gun and that is exactly why she doesn't own one.

In the stillness of his muscles there is a self-contained quivering that matches the buzzing of the fly at his window, hitting itself against the screen again and again. The buzzing becomes a language in her head. They fit differently around each other than she remembers (not that she ever thought about it--of course). __

Three years is a long time, she thinks she hears him say; he's talking into her hair, mumbling, words all jumbled and half-started, and she puts one unsure hand to the back of his head. He is less strong than she remembers. She remembers everything and nothing--and they were nothing like this.

Three years is a long time. But one hundred and eight days--that was a lifetime._  
_  
"You . . . you smell like cigarettes," he whispers to the collar of her leather jacket, childlike in his disappointment. What she thinks he means is _you've changed_ and _you're okay_ and_ I could have helped you_, but none of those three last are true. He doesn't understand why she did it, but he wants her here, and she thinks that should probably satisfy her.

She smokes to disguise her voice, but she doesn't say that because she knows he would think lung cancer and he would worry. She smokes because Kate Austen doesn't smoke. She smokes because it reminds her of the Westerns she watched as a kid, hiding behind the sofa while the grown-ups talked, the outlaws riding into the sunset and drinking around campfires in the desert. Grainy, out-of-focus black-and-white mirages that don't really help her--but at least they don't hurt.

"Secondhand," she says, and she doesn't make her voice soft and young for him on purpose--old habits; some things she can't help. It doesn't matter if he believes her. "I was in a bar." (I saw your father. That much is true.)

He doesn't care. He strokes her hair and she can feel a cramp growing in her side, the makings of a headache marring the sweet taste of reunion clogged in her throat. She keeps smiling and he keeps holding on. They are still playing parts. And she still wants it. The question is whether she wants it enough. Hasn't this always been the question?

"Don't leave," he says, pulling back and brushing his thumbs against her cheekbones. His eyes swim and he tilts his head, frowning at the dried blood beneath her nose. "Don't leave, Kate," again, and it comes out quickly enough that she knows he must have rehearsed. "Don't." It's an order.

She grips his shoulder harder than she means to and pulls him back into their embrace. "Okay?" he asks, softer, and she nods almost frantically, her other hand sliding around his waist and into his coat.

"Okay," she murmurs. "Okay, Jack," and the feel of her breath against his neck makes him grow very still. She remembers why she loved him, once upon a time, three years and one lifetime ago.

She smiles again, and doesn't cry, and isn't sick, and as her right hand slips comfortably around the phone in his pocket she feels nothing at all.


End file.
